Gartner: Digital Experience Monitoring of remote workers is urgent necessity

In an enduring era of remote working, it has never been more important to have visibility of the digital experience of employees.

Don't be lulled into thinking this is a 'nice to have'.

In fact Gartner has described adoption of the technology as an "urgent necessity" for organisations. They did that in September 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic-enforced lockdowns. It is even more relevant now.

The work-from-home shift has created unforeseen IT challenges and many enterprises are losing direct control of infrastructure and applications.

Digital experience monitoring provides visibility across endpoints, Wi-Fi, home networks and the Internet, allowing IT to understand and solve problems fast, protecting employees' productivity. 

What is Digital Experience Monitoring?

DEM makes it possible to get a view of application performance issues from the vantage point of the user's experience. It allows IT teams to isolate service performance problems across the delivery chain and speed root cause determination and resolution.

DEM is not new. Global research consultancies, Forrester and Gartner, have been reporting on the industry for the past six years. However, the phenomenal growth of SaaS, and the Covid-19 inspired shift to remote work has made the technology ever more vital. 

Source: Sinefa.com

Move to SaaS has created visibility challenges

Gartner has estimated that 44% of cloud spend is on SaaS and that is creating visibility challenges for IT teams and is a risk for employee and customer experience, revenue and brand reputation.

MobileCorp Senior Solutions Consultant, Peter Pouw, has regularly come across experience issues that are eluding resolution because of a lack of visibility. 

He describes three recent scenarios:

• The Managing Director of a large Tobacco company who can't access email running out of a Microsoft tenancy halfway across the world. The outcome was a commercially sensitive document not received in time.
• A SAP application where the connection drops out and causes ever increasing frustration for the mobile workforce tasked with recording meter readings. The issue was risking the loss of some if not all of the existing contracts they had with the Utility company they acted on behalf of.
• Over 100 retail outlets suffering ongoing voice-related issues such as calls dropping or poor audio quality. The impact was lost customer business that occurred for months on end, franchisee frustration and a loss in confidence in the Telco providing the hosted telephony platform that was self managed by the company.

It is unlikely these issues can be solved with traditional problem solving techniques used in the past, he says. In each case it was Sinefa's DEM platform that provided the insight and answers. 

• The cause of the email inaccessibility was due to the latency of running traffic to the other side of the world and a poorly configured zscaler application.
• The culprit was a GIS application that ran only at a particular time of the day as it was set to automatically update, which consumed almost all of the Internet bandwidth available on the meter readers' mobile devices.
• In this instance it was a poorly designed hunt group set up by the customer that was replicated across all sites. It mimicked a contact centre scenario that accounted for 80% of all traffic on the SBC’s they connected to owned by a major Telco.

A DEM will bring clarity to the source of the issue, says Pouw. The centralised IT team will have visibility to each element of the network channel.

Why legacy monitoring tools don't cut it 

"Traditional monitoring practices and technologies are limited in their ability to effectively monitor the end-user experience, limiting I&O leaders’ ability to identify and impact digital experience performance gaps."

Gartner, September 2019

Gartner highlights two reasons why this occurs:

• I&O leaders often deploy monitoring tools that are domain-centric and do not provide
  perspective on the overall user experience, resulting in a focus on the wrong areas.

• Most end-user experience issues are discovered by reacting to service desk incidents,
  undercutting I&O leaders’ initiatives to respond to and correct issues more quickly.

Where DEM fits into the visibility stack

DEM solutions complement existing Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostic (NPMD) tools. Together they provide an end-to-end picture, with DEM also adding insight into user experience, and it is those experiences which most directly translate into business outcomes.

DEM monitoring solution augments an existing tool stack with the following functional dimensions:

• Endpoint Monitoring
• Network Path Analysis (per-hop path analysis at layer 3)
• Synthetic Application Testing (e.g. HTTP monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring)
• Traffic Analysis - Packet-level (DPI) visibility and performance insights
• Real User Monitoring (sometimes called end user experience monitoring)
• Collective Intelligence (benchmark and learn from your peers and best in class performance)
• Adaptive Learning for zero config deployment and operation (based on discovered traffic)

MobileCorp recommends Sinefa for Australian DEM

MobileCorp has partnered with Australia's only home-grown digital experience and performance monitoring software vendor, Sinefa.

Founded in Melbourne and headquartered in San Francisco, Sinefa’s flagship product is a cloud-based network monitoring platform that provides insights and information to help identify and resolve network issues.

Chris Siakos, Sinefa founder, explains his vision:

”We help enterprises understand the digital experience of all their applications and all their users no matter where they are.

"We bring the whole digital experience journey for SaaS applications like Office 365 onto a single dashboard and help IT fix performance issues with speed and precision.”